How to Fix an HTTP 403.9 error

How to Fix an HTTP 403.9 error

My Developers were pinging me about getting 403.9's when trying to access their websites (Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected Internet Information Services).

It turns out that the IIS on Windows XP or other OSes come configured out of the box for a maximum of 10 HTTP connections. And IE uses up 2 connections when hitting a website.

I tried figuring out how to raise the connection limit, but there didn't seem to be a documented way of doing this on a non-server version of Windows.

Fortunately, there's a way to do it: 

Here's his tip: 

This can be bumped up to 40 but not higher, 

[40 is the hard-coded limit]

To do this, find the adsutil.vbs script (should be in

c:\inetpub\AdminScripts or similar) and run the following command: 

adsutil set w3svc/MaxConnections 40

IF THE ABOVE COMMAND DOES NOT WORK ON WINDOWS XP, USE THE BELOW :

CScript.exe adsutil.vbs set w3svc/MaxConnections 40

You can also try to prevent individuals from hogging a bunch of connections and thereby blocking out other users.  (IE will normally use 2 connections to a web site.)  To do this, launch the IIS admin tool (under control panel / administrative tools), right click on your ‘default web site’ (under ‘web sites’ in the outline control), and mess with the settings in the “connections” part of the “web site” tab.  Lowering the timeout (default is 5 min) will cause idle connections to get dropped quicker.  Disabling keep alives will cause connections to disconnect immediately after the request is handled instead of waiting for new requests on the same connection.  This is a little extreme but you probably don’t care that much about responsiveness, so you might want to just try that and see if it solves the problem.